Theater, History of the

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Theater (from the Greek verb theasthai, "to view" or "to see," whence theatron, or "seeing place") may be defined not only as a structure in which dramatic performances are given, but as the sum of all the arts required for the production of a dramatic, or imitative, action. These include acting; theater costume and makeup; directing; stage lighting; theater architecture and staging; machinery and special effects; and dramaturgy or playwriting (see drama). Theater is an eclectic art form that often employs music and dance in its productions as well as the talents of leading artists from outside the theater. Other mimetic performing arts (such as opera and ballet) are closely related to the theater. The principal distinctions are that opera consists of song and musical dialogue throughout, whereas ballet is an art of rhythmic movement precisely timed to music. The following essay focuses on the evolution of the theater in different periods and cultures.

Origins of the Theater

The theater originated in the cultures of those primitive societies whose members used imitative dances to propitiate the supernatural powers that were believed to control events crucial to their survival. A shaman, priest, or medicine man (in effect, the first director) taught complicated dance steps and led these ritual dance-dramas. These were thought to persuade supernatural forces to regulate the seasons and elements. They would help ensure the Earth's fertility and grant the tribe success in hunting and warfare. Other ritual dances were believed to expel evil spirits that caused disease and to force the souls of the newly dead to depart the world of the living. The priests and performers in these dance-dramas wore masks, which sometimes represented the spirits invoked. Their costumes were made of skins and bark. As knowledge of natural phenomena increased, drama ceased to be exclusively ritualistic and also became an educational tool. It was used especially in initiation ceremonies that acquainted the young with tribal culture. A later development—more germane to the evolution of the theater and drama of today—was the enactment of legends of gods and tribal heroes. Such dramas were also performed in early civilized societies. In Egypt, dramas dealing with the god Osiris continued to be produced until at least as late as the 5th century B.C.

Classical Greek and Roman Theater

The history of European theater begins with the Greeks. Their annual festivals in honor of the god Dionysus included competitions in tragedy and comedy. The first of these dramatic forms evolved from choral songs (choric dithyrambs) concerning the death and resurrection of Dionysus. This occurred about the middle of the 6th century B.C., when Thespis of Icaria (in a drama of his own composition) impersonated a character and engaged the chorus in dialogue. He thereby became both the first playwright and the first actor. (Starting in the 16th century, the noun thespian has been a synonym for actor.) Thespis won first prize in the initial tragedy competition held at Athens in 534 B.C. and is also credited with the introduction of masks. These masks were thereafter a conventional feature of Greek and Roman theater. The tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles later added a second and a third actor to tragedy. At about the beginning of the 5th century B.C., comedy was given written form by Epicharmus of Syracuse and was also admitted to the festivals. The ancient chorus was retained as an integral part of Greek drama and eventually consisted of a standard number of members: 15 in tragedy and 24 in comedy. In a satyr play—a short burlesque that dramatists were expected to submit along with their tragedies—the chorus comprised either 12 or 15 members. All of the roles were played by men; women were not allowed to perform in the Greek theater.

The early Greek playwrights not only wrote and frequently acted in their plays but also served as directors and choreographers; some may also have composed their own music (Greek tragedy was intensely musical). Sophocles is said to have been a scene designer and Aeschylus to have invented the tragic costume. Tragic actors wore a tight-sleeved and belted tunic called a chiton; a variety of cloaks over the chiton; the cothurnus, or tragedian's boot, which in later periods became exaggeratedly elevated by the addition of a wooden platform to the sole; and the helmetlike mask with attached wig, in which the forehead elevation was proportional to the social status of the character represented. Characters in Old Comedy were usually costumed in short chitons heavily padded in front and behind and wore grotesque masks. With the arrival of New Comedy in the later 4th century B.C., these features were discarded and comic characters became more respectably dressed.

The original Greek theater at Athens was simply a large circle known as the orchēstra ("dancing place"). There the choric dithyrambs and early plays of Thespis and Aeschylus were staged. The spectators sat on seats set into the southern slope of the Acropolis. The only scenery consisted of a few set pieces such as tombs and rocks. It was not until about 460 B.C. that a skené, or stage building, was added at the rear of the orchestra. The actors then made their entrances and exits through this structure. The chorus continued to enter from the sides, and the acting was still confined to the flat orchestra. A limited amount of scenery was painted on panels attached to the skené. Several special effects and machines were also available. The last included the eccyclema, or "wheeling out" machine, a wagon or perhaps a turntable on which bloody tableaux were displayed after a murder had occurred in the palace. A crane was used by which actors representing gods could be flown above the stage. The playwright Euripides was fond of both these devices (but his contemporary Aristophanes ridiculed his use of them in several of his comedies).

By the 4th century B.C. the playwright no longer controlled all aspects of production. The Greek theater had become a professional institution with specialists responsible for the various aspects of theatrical art. In the next two centuries, during the Hellenistic Age, the physical structure of the theater continued to evolve. The most notable innovation was the addition of a raised stage (logeion, or "speaking place") to the building; this is where most of the acting took place. The capital of the Romans did not possess a permanent theater until 55 B.C. They also staged their productions on a raised stage before an elaborately decorated stage building and reduced the orchestra and the auditorium to a semicircle. Unlike the Greeks, they rarely set their theaters into hillsides; rather, they built freestanding structures that could be covered by huge awnings and are reputed to have seated as many as 40,000 spectators. Within these magnificent buildings both tragedy and comedy—almost entirely derived from Greek models—were performed. The Roman innovation of pantomime (see mime and pantomime) was also performed. The pantomime actor frequently changed masks and, accompanied by a large chorus and orchestra, mimed and danced all the roles in the drama.

Early Roman actors were often slaves owned by managers who offered their performers and plays to the magistrates in charge of the ludi, or games, at which drama was presented. Later actors such as Claudius Aesopus, Roscius, and the pantomimists Pylades and Bathyllus—all of whom flourished in the 1st century B.C.—were citizens and attained considerable fame and fortune. Far more opportunities existed for dramatic performances in Rome and its territories than in Greece; Roman actors therefore were able to work a good part of the year.

Medieval Theater

Later Roman actors did not find favor with the early Christians; they objected to its parodies of Christian sacraments. A barrage of church decrees was directed against the theater and anyone patronizing it. By the end of the 7th century, theatrical entertainments had been extinguished in both the western and eastern Roman Empire. Yet the church was also responsible for the rebirth of the theater during the Middle Ages, when dramatic performances based on the story of the Resurrection were introduced into the Easter service (see medieval drama). From these little tropes arose the great cycles of mystery plays that dramatized virtually every phase of biblical history. These vast cycles were produced by various guilds, lay religious brotherhoods, and whole communities; they occasionally took as many as 25 or even 40 days to perform. They were given outdoors—in town squares, Roman amphitheaters, and sometimes on wagon stages that moved through city streets. They typically made use of a neutral playing area called the platea. The acting was done primarily by amateurs. The theatrical tricks included such spectacular effects as flames and smoke belching from Hellmouth, floods of water, and massacres with flowing blood. These and the hangings and crucifixions often posed serious hazards for the actors. The directors were also usually amateurs.

The Renaissance

By the mid-16th century the medieval religious theater was in decline. It was shortly to be succeeded by a revival of secular drama performed by professional acting companies. In England such troupes had been attached to the households of noblemen and the king since the 15th century. At first they performed in halls and inns but eventually in theaters of their own. The first of these—named "The Theatre"—was erected on the outskirts of London in 1576. Other Elizabethan playhouses—the Curtain, the Rose, and the famous Globe Theatre—followed soon after. In general these circular or polygonal structures had a three-story "frame" surrounding an open-air yard. Spectators sat in boxes or galleries within the frame or stood below in the yard. A large portion of the yard was occupied by a platform stage that was partially protected by a "shadow" (or roof). At the rear of the stage was the "tiring house"; here the actors dressed and stored their properties. The building also possessed a gallery or upper acting area and an alcove or inner stage. This gallery was on a level with the platform stage and could be closed off by a curtain. At the top of the tiring house was the hut, from which a limited amount of machinery was operated. The staging practices in these playhouses were indebted to the medieval theater. The actors' costumes were mainly contemporary and only rarely attempted historical accuracy. Often sumptuous, they represented an investment second only to the expense of the playhouse.

Elizabethan actors—all of whom were male—were organized under the guild system of masters, journeymen, and apprentices. These troupes were known by the titles of the noblemen or members of the royal family who were their patrons. Thus William Shakespeare and the actor Richard Burbage (the original interpreter of Hamlet, Othello, and Richard III) were both members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Those in the group came under the patronage of the king in 1603 and thereafter were known as the King's Men. Their contemporary Edward Alleyn performed the leading roles in the plays of Christopher Marlowe and was a member of the rival Lord Admiral's Men (later Prince Henry's Men). Those master actors who pooled their resources to erect the theaters and purchase the costumes and properties required by their companies were also known as "sharers." This was the system adopted by the Lord Chamberlain's Men and one in which Shakespeare was both a master actor and sharer. Other companies sometimes played in theaters owned by such nonactors as the enterprising Philip Henslowe, the father-in-law of Alleyn. Henslowe built and managed no less than three theaters. The sharers or managers also bought plays outright from the dramatists—who were not entitled to royalties or any additional payments if their works were published. Besides performing in the large public playhouses, Elizabethan actors frequently took their productions to court. During the winter months they appeared in smaller indoor houses known as "private" theaters.

In Spain the public theaters were owned by religious brotherhoods and municipal governments. Set up in corrales, or large yards between houses, such theaters were similar to those in England. Again there was a platform stage. Behind the stage was a two-story building with both upper and inner acting areas. Spectators occupied rooms (aposentos, or "boxes") in the adjacent houses in addition to sitting on benches or in boxes or standing in the yard. These theaters were originally open to the weather. They remained in use until the mid-18th century.

In Spain (as in England) all roles were portrayed by males; this convention persisted until 1587. The actors were under contract to managers, known as autores de comedias. These managers purchased costumes and plays and hired out their troupes to the lessees of the corrales. The companies were also engaged to perform at annual religious festivals and, especially during the 17th century, at the Spanish court. During this period Spanish drama experienced its golden age, with such prolific playwrights as Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca writing hundreds of secular and religious plays.

It was in Renaissance Italy that the theater first broke definitively with the medieval tradition. Inspired by descriptions of the ancient Roman theater in the writings of Vitruvius and other Latin authors, the Italian humanists (see humanism) deliberately set out to re-create its structure. This endeavor culminated in the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, designed by the architect Andrea Palladio and opened in 1585.

The humanists also learned from their reading that the Greeks and Romans had occasionally used illusionistic paintings on their stages and had devised three-sided revolving prisms (periaktoi) to change such scenery. These descriptions led to experiments with periaktoi and other methods of changing scenery before the eyes of the audience. A proscenium frame and front curtain then came into use, as did a variety of flying machines and special effects. The majority of Renaissance theaters were indoor structures; lighting—supplied by candles and oil lamps—also became an important consideration.

The actors in the early Italian theater were usually amateurs. By the mid-16th century, they had been supplanted to a great extent by the professional players of the commedia dell'arte. These performers improvised comedies but were equally at home in literary and musical drama. The actors appeared as stock characters in improvised comedies—Pantalone, Arlecchino, Pulcinella, the Dottore all performed in standardized costumes and wearing masks. Actors impersonating female servants such as Columbine and the characters of young lovers usually dispensed with the last convention. A notable feature of these companies is that from their inception some seem to have included women. The beautiful Isabella Andreini (1562–1604), who belonged to the troupe known as the Gelosi, was the most celebrated actress of her day and was also a gifted dramatist and poet.

The commedia players traveled widely and were extremely popular outside Italy. Their appearance in 16th-century Spain, for example, led to the admission of women to the Spanish companies. In Paris, where they were known as La Comédie Italienne, they were even given a theater of their own. In these and other ways, the players exerted considerable influene on the theaters of other nations.

Baroque and Eighteenth-Century Theater

By the early 17th century the Italian theater had given rise to the architectural structure and staging conventions that, with minor variations, have remained in use to the present day. The auditorium itself had evolved into a bench-filled "orchestra," or parterre area, before the stage and a series of galleries divided into boxes at the sides and rear of the house. The stage was separated from the auditorium by the familiar proscenium, or "picture frame." This area was decorated with perspective settings painted on flats that could easily be changed either by hand or, through a later invention of the designer Giacomo Torelli (1608–78), by an ingenious mechanical system of chariots, ropes, and counterweights. Similar architectural structures and scenic practices were soon adopted throughout Europe. Countries such as England and France retained vestiges of their earlier platform stages in the shape of "aprons," or forestages, in front of the proscenium.

A peculiarity of the early English and American theaters was the presence of two or more doors opening onto the apron. The actors often made their entrances and exits through these. This convention persisted (as did the apron) until well into the 19th century. The more ostentatious spectators sat on these forestages. The actors—who had to move among these spectators—and the audiences were often annoyed by this custom.

The admission of women to both French and English acting companies began during the 17th century. In England, following the accession of Charles II in 1660, the earlier convention of using boy apprentices for female roles was abandoned. Such actresses as Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle appeared in the plays of Thomas Otway and William Congreve. In France the former acrobat Thérèse du Parc, after starting with Molière's troupe, became a leading tragedienne in the plays of Jean Racine. She was followed by the actress known as La Champmeslé, who in 1677 created the title role in Racine's Phèdre and later became the first leading tragedienne at La Comédie Française. These actresses were complemented by such male actors as Thomas Betterton, famed for his naturalness in both tragedy and comedy, and Michel Baron, who was personally trained by Molière. Actors were granted salaries or shares in the companies' profits. Some were even granted such "benefits" as profits from the performance after the house expenses had been deducted. English playwrights received benefits after their plays had run a certain number of nights. Like their French colleagues, they retained the right to publish their works. As yet there was no professional director; these duties usually fell to one of the principal actors and sometimes to the dramatist. Molière, who was an actor as well as a playwright, directed the members of his company. Racine coached the actors in his plays.

By the early 18th century a few individuals, such as the English playwright Aaron Hill, were urging reform in costume and scenic practices. David Garrick (possibly the finest actor of the century) attempted historically accurate productions while managing the Drury Lane Theatre in London from 1747 to 1776. The playwright and actor Charles Macklin's career spanned most of the century; he experimented with realistic costumes in his roles of Shylock and Macbeth. In France, actors such as Hippolyte Clairon and the director of the Opéra Comique, Charles Simon Favart, initiated similar reforms at their theaters. There was no consistent attention paid to such details; it was not until the 19th century that it became customary to create historically accurate costumes and settings for individual productions.

Meanwhile, the American colonial theater—supplied with English actors, English plays, and following English stage practices—had taken its first tentative steps. In Germany, where English and French influences had dominated during the 16th and 17th centuries, native actors and playwrights had at last come into their own. The German theater was spurred on by such figures as Konrad Ekhof (1720–78), known as the father of German acting, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the first German playwright of distinction. Both court and municipal theaters in Germany experienced a period of unprecedented growth and support by the aristocracy and the emerging middle class. There shortly followed the versatile actor Friedrich L. Schröder (1744–1816), who directed the Hamburg National Theater during the last third of the century. He encouraged the young German playwrights who formed the revolutionary Sturm und Drang school of drama and was famous for his productions of Shakespeare. The actor, playwright, and director August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) worked in Mannheim and Berlin. A distinctive style of ensemble acting and unified production known as Weimar Classicism evolved at the court theater of Weimar when it was under the artistic management (1791–1817) of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The actors (and sometimes even the audiences) were carefully disciplined by the autocratic director; costumes and settings were based on historical research; and the plays of Goethe and of his friend Johann Friedrich von Schiller were splendidly produced. The 18th century was also the last great age of aristocratic theater. This was particularly true in France and the Germanic countries, where ballet and opera were supported on a lavish scale. At the court theaters of Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and Bologna, the beautiful settings of the Bibienas (see Galli da Bibiena family) and their followers often enhanced such productions.

Theater of Asia

The theater of Asia has an equally long and illustrious history. Its origins also appear to have been in ritualistic dance-dramas. To this day dance and music play an important role in Asian theater. The theater remains intensely symbolic and requires considerable sophistication on the part of its viewers. The actors appear in masks or wear highly artificial and masklike makeup whose appearance and colors indicate the characters' social status and qualities. The design and colors of costumes are equally symbolic; movements and gestures—each of which carries a precise meaning—are carefully choreographed and codified; speech is artificial and often musical; and scenery and stage properties are usually minimal. Scenery is frequently omitted altogether, and properties are often used to represent a startling variety of locales. In the Chinese theater, a few chairs and a table may be variously arranged to indicate a bridge, a boat, or even a mountain; an actor with a small whip in his hand represents a man on horseback.

The earliest theaters in Asia are believed to have been in India. There Sanskrit dramas were produced in temples and at court several centuries before the birth of Christ. The acting area seems to have been a raised platform before a curtain; in place of scenery the actors or a narrator set the stage with dialogue and pantomime. In China, where the distinctive form of theater known as Peking Opera evolved at the end of the 18th century, the stage was originally a roofed platform with two doors at the rear. Stagehands were dressed in black and by convention understood to be invisible; they manipulated properties while the drama was in progress. Female roles were undertaken by males; the actor Mei Lanfang was the outstanding interpreter of women in the 20th century.

More familiar to contemporary Western audiences is the theater of Japan. Three indigenous forms—No drama, Bunraku, and Kabuki—are still produced and have been seen in Europe and the United States. The No theater originated in the 14th century and was initially given before aristocratic and priestly audiences. The masked actors are exclusively male and traditionally make their entrances onto the roofed platform stage along a "bridge" or runway at the rear. In Bunraku, all of the actors are puppets; each of their complicated movements require no less than three expert handlers. It was for this theater that the famous playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote many of his later dramas.

Chikamatsu also wrote for the popular Kabuki theater, which began in the 17th century and borrowed many elements from No and Bunraku. This form of theater is more realistic in its scenic practices. Dance plays a prominent role, and the actors appear in exaggerated makeup. In the 18th century, rapid shifts of setting became possible with the introduction of the revolving stage—a feature eventually adopted by Western theater. A runway (hanamichi) over which the actors make their entrances is another characteristic feature of the Kabuki playhouse. Unlike the runway in the No theater, this connects with the front of the stage and runs through the auditorium from the rear of the house. Another well-known form of theater in Asia is the shadow puppet play of Indonesia. Shadow plays were also performed in China and Japan (and toward the end of the 18th century in Paris, where they were known as ombres chinoises: see shadow play). They were later (in the 1790s) performed in London, where they were introduced by circus proprietor Philip Astley.

Nineteenth-Century Theater

At the close of the 18th century a number of social and political events wrought profound changes in the European theater. The turmoil of the French Revolution foretold the end of the aristocratic tradition. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the cities now experienced a tremendous swelling of their populations as laborers poured in from the countryside. New forms of drama evolved that reflected these changes. In London, Paris, and other major cities a host of new theaters appeared to cater to the tastes of working-class audiences. There were pantomimes, spectacles, vaudevilles (see music hall, vaudeville, and burlesque), and—an invention of the playwrights August von Kotzebue and Guilbert de Pixérécourt—melodrama. Romantic drama and revivals of the classics were produced at the major theaters and were performed by notable actors in France (François Joseph Talma, Mademoiselles Mars and Duchenois, and Rachel, the famous interpreter of Racine's Phèdre) and in England (John Philip Kemble and his sister Sarah Siddons, Edmund Kean, and William Charles Macready). The United States continued to be heavily dependent on Europe for its drama and theater practices during most of the 19th century. The first native actors to achieve international reputations were the African American tragedian Ira Aldridge; the brawny Edwin Forrest; Edwin Booth, who also managed his own theater in New York City; and Charlotte Saunders Cushman.

A few innovations in theater architecture were achieved during the 19th century. By the 1820s gas had replaced candles and oil lamps in many theaters; limelight and the carbon arc for spotlighting effects were in common use by midcentury; and in 1881, with the opening of the Savoy Theatre in London, the stage was first lit by electricity. Stages became fully trapped (a few—like Booth's New York theater—had hydraulic lifts). Scenery could be raised from below or "flown in" from above the stage. Settings, properties, and costumes attained maximum realism and historical accuracy. The old flats on which scenery had formerly been painted in perspective gave way to elaborate practical settings (changes of setting often required long waits between scenes); the completely enclosed, or "box," set came into use for comedies; moving panoramas facilitated spectacular travel effects; and even the plays of Shakespeare were now performed with meticulous attention to historical accuracy. Libraries and archives were ransacked to provide authentic sources for designers and costumers; real animals joined the actors; volcanoes erupted, hurricanes toppled mock trees, and ships—as in Shakespeare's The Tempest—sank on cue. The "long run" became increasingly common. The older repertory system—under which theaters had changed their bills almost nightly and a single house might present dozens of new and old plays in a single season—was gradually abandoned.

Concurrent with the rise of these elaborately planned productions was the arrival of the modern director. The director might still be a leading actor but was also responsible for overseeing every aspect of production and for imposing a unity on the whole. This arrangement also encouraged an ensemble style of acting, in which the actors blended their talents and none starred at the expense of others—or of the play itself. Among the earliest of this new breed in England were the actress, dancer, and singer Madame Vestris. She produced comedies and extravaganzas at her elegant little theater, the Olympic, in the 1830s. Charles Kean (son of Edmund) was celebrated for his Shakespearean productions at the Princess's Theatre in the 1850s. Kean was especially noted for his skillful handling of crowd scenes and exerted a profound influence on George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The duke's own company of German actors toured throughout Europe in the 1870s and 1880s. And his work directly influenced such directors as André Antoine and Konstantin Stanislavsky. The principles of this style of production—sometimes referred to as the "theater of the régisseur (director)"—are still widely followed (although most present-day directors do not act in their productions). The status of the playwright also improved during the 19th century. At the urging of dramatists such as Dion Boucicault, copyright laws were enacted to protect authors' rights, and dramatists now became entitled to royalties.

By the final decades of the 19th century a number of playwrights had tired of the romantic claptrap and artificial dramas of their predecessors and sought to give a truer depiction of life. These authors—Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, and Gerhart Hauptmann among them—founded the naturalistic school of drama. Because their controversial works were forbidden in the commercial theaters of most countries, it became necessary to establish subscription theaters that were nominally private and thus beyond the control of official censors. From this necessity sprang the Independent Theater movement. The first of these theaters was the Théâtre Libre in Paris (founded by André Antoine in 1887). Die Freie Bühne in Berlin (1889) and the Independent Theater (1891) in London quickly followed. As even newer schools of drama appeared on the scene, playwrights continued to find outlets for their works in theaters that pursued artistic rather than commercial objectives. In 1898 the Moscow Art Theater—famous above all for its productions of Anton Chekhov—was founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko. In 1907 the expressionist author August Strindberg began to present his own plays at the Intima Teatern in Stockholm. Even the classical repertory was undergoing an intensive reevaluation. In 1894 the English director William Poel founded the Elizabethan Stage Society. Its productions of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists broke with the 19th-century tradition of realistic staging and attempted to re-create the conventions and architectural arrangements of Shakespeare's day. This approach is still followed at numerous Shakespeare festival theaters.

Twentieth-Century Theater

As the 20th century began, a number of designers were also calling for a break with older traditions. Both Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia argued for settings and lighting that were suggestive and expressive of the mood of the drama rather than realistic. Their ideas have influenced many later theater artists. In the United States the most eminent has been Robert Edmond Jones—although no particular school of design can be said to predominate at the present day. Stage designs of the 20th century have included both the most elaborately detailed naturalistic settings and stages devoid of anything but a few essential properties. Then there is the bizarre constructivist (see constructivism) settings created in the 1920s for the Russian director Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold, who expected his actors to physicalize their emotions and to perform within playgroundlike settings as gymnasts and acrobats. The Italianate proscenium-frame stage—an object of scorn to avant-garde directors—remains entrenched in the majority of theaters. A few experimental theaters have used arena staging or theater in the round—an innovation whose antecedents can be traced to the theaters of prehistory.

The eclecticism that pervaded the 20th-century theater is perhaps best summarized in the international career of the Austrian director Max Reinhardt. He worked in an amazing variety of locales that included large and small theaters with and without proscenium frames. He also worked in cabarets, churches, royal palaces and riding schools, as well as the converted Circus Schumann in Berlin. He even directed performances in such outdoor settings as the Hollywood Bowl and the square before the cathedral in Salzburg, Austria. (In the 1930s, Reinhardt also directed a few films in Hollywood.) The playwrights whose works he produced ranged from Sophocles through Shakespeare and Calderon to such modern writers as Frank Wedekind and Luigi Pirandello. Each production received its own unique style and scenic treatment. He often incorporated the latest technical developments, including the revolving stage and plaster domes or cycloramas behind and above the stage.

As with design, architecture, and theatrical direction, there was no dominant style of acting in the 20th century. Method acting was derived from Stanislavsky's teachings; it has been found useful by many directors and actors in naturalistic productions (see Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg). It is also recognized that deliberately artificial styles are more appropriate to the works of dramatists outside the realistic tradition. Bertolt Brecht's theories of production were perhaps more influential than those of anyone else in the second half of the century. He always insisted that actors in his plays remain aware of the fact that they were acting and that they not surrender their personalities to the characters they were impersonating. The play itself and the social message it contained were to be of paramount interest; the spectators were to be continually reminded that they were viewing a theatrical event so that they would not sympathize with the characters as real-life figures. Such sympathy would allow their critical judgment to be clouded by emotion. Lest the actors themselves prove incapable of such detachment, Brecht employed a number of devices to "alienate" his audiences from any illusions of reality that might endanger their objectivity. His plays were presented as historical rather than as immediate events. Projected captions were used to inform spectators in advance what they were to witness in a forthcoming scene. Musical numbers and humorous episodes were inserted to undercut serious ones. Lighting and sets were nonrealistic, and even the stagehands' activities were visible.

Since Reinhardt and since Brecht, the theater in the West has become even more avid to incorporate novelty (although most notably in Europe rather than in America). The radical experiments of the 1960s and '70s—such as the work of the Living Theatre and of Jerzy Grotowski—no longer seem outrageous. The theatrics of street performance have penetrated the legitimate theater in the creations of the new vaudevillians—mimes and clowns such as Bill Irwin. The best of performance art and of improvisational theater have contributed their work. And such iconoclasts as the director Robert Wilson have brought the idioms of opera and dance into theatrical productions, in a sense returning the theater to the center of the arts, as it was in its Greek beginnings.

21st-Century Theater

Performance art and theatrical experimentation also thrive in the 21st century—as do dramatic plays, musicals and political theater, and more. Such playwrights as Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, August Wilson, Caryl Churchill, and Yasmina Reza continue to write powerful and socially relevant plays in the new millennium.

The 20th century was a revolutionary time for theater; the 21st century also promises to be a time of great change in the arts. Dedicated playwrights, actors, and designers continue to contribute their talents to theaters large and small in communities around the world. Yet although enthusiastic audiences and theater fans still support the theater, the economic downturn in the early 21st century affected attendance, artistic opportunities, and funding. And, while the need for engaging audiences in live and human experiences continues, digital technology and the Internet certainly affect the number of people who attend live theater performances.

Some critics believe that young audiences must be developed in order for the traditions of theatrical performance to continue. They believe that the young need to be exposed to and educated about theater at an early age, but this is becoming more difficult as arts education programs in schools have suffered severe budget cuts. How the world of the theater will change—and if it will survive—depends not only on the expensive plays and musicals performed in the major cities of the world but also in the new works created by those dedicated to presenting the mysteries, joys, and tragedies of the human experience in schools, in small independent theaters, or anywhere else around the world where people welcome live performances.

A. H. Saxon

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